Discussions

The snowball isn't melting down below, and NORAD doesn't report any porcine UFOs. Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft's VP of strategic and emerging business development, is scheduled to give the June 4 keynote address at JavaOne.

In a statement, Microsoft said its customers need more openness. "We continue to intensify our efforts in several areas, as evidenced by our recent agreement to use the SAML federation standard in both the Sun OpenSSO Enterprise federation solution and the forthcoming Microsoft "Geneva" Server federation solution," Microsoft said.

It was only 9 short years ago that Sun and Microsoft settled their lawsuit (http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=2899). And look at the fine things we Java developers can do with Microsoft technology today. Well... I'm trying to think of what the Microsoft platform offers that Java developers don't have in their own platform? Both platforms seem well equipped to deliver applications and services.
I very much hope that Dan'l's talk is more than a warming up to SAML and OpenSSO. Those are great technologies that solve problems. But they are very, very esoteric compared to the real problems PushToTest's customers encounter today.
My wish list for Microsoft consists of 3 things:
1) I wish Microsoft would announce a test tools strategy that encompasses EJB, .NET, Spring, RIA (Ajax, Flash, Flex, SilverLight, JavaFX) and desktop development technologies. Even Microsoft is using Selenium, among a hundred other technologies. For example, PushToTest customers would greatly benefit from Microsoft investing in a record/playback tool that uses their new IAccessibility API to drive Windows applications. IAccessibility combined with Iron Python would be awesome.
2) I wish Microsoft and Sun would support Kerberos. My recollection is that Kerberos is covered in the WS security standard, so I would expect it to be included in something that calls itself WSS4J, and if it's not there then it should be a fairly straight forward addition. (Thanks Phil.)
3) I wish Microsoft and Sun would pick up the dead reins of a Business Process Management standard and run with it. Imagine if Microsoft and Sun/Oracle were to deliver a BPM standard. Imagine what that would do to IBM. Imagine what that would do to improve the reliability, performance, and maintainability of modern application software!
I'm going to see if I can get an interview with Dan'l so I can let TheServerSide community know how they will benefit from Microsoft's initiatives at JavaOne.
-Frank Cohen
http://www.pushtotest.com

Microsoft's vice president of strategic and emerging business development Dan'l Lewin will speak on June 4, providing an update on Sun and Microsoft's effort to make Java interoperate with Microsoft's .NET programming environment.

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